British free teen pro-WikiLeaks hackers

LONDON, Jan. 28 (UPI) -- Five British hackers, three of them teenagers, arrested for attacks supporting Wikileaks, were freed on bail Friday, authorities said.

The three teenagers, aged 15, 16 and 19, and two adults were arrested in raids across England Thursday, The Guardian reported. They were told to report to their local police stations in April.

The online network calling itself Anonymous, which claims cyberattacks against sites blocking WikiLeaks financing, branded the arrests "a serious declaration of war."

"You can easily arrest individuals, but you cannot arrest an ideology," the statement said. "We are united by a common objective and we can and will cross any borders to achieve that. So our advice to you, the U.K. government, is to take this statement as a serious warning from the citizens of the world. We will not rest until our fellow anon protesters have been released."

Distributed denial of services attacks, which crash sites with floods of requests, can carry a 10-year sentence in both Britain and the United States.

The FBI executed more than 40 search warrants across the United States Thursday in its investigation of Anonymous.